Wireless

I was perusing some articles on mobile advertising recently and was absolutely stunned at how big some analysts think this market will be. According to this TMCnetarticle, Strategy Analyticspredicts the global market for mobile advertising is slated to reach $14 billion by 2011.
ABI Researchpredicts the global market for mobile marketing and advertising will reach $3 billion by the end of 2007, and expand to $19 billion in 2011.
If we take the mid-way point between the estimates, the mobile ad market will be $16.5 billion in 2011. To put this in real-world terms it means that one-billion users will generate about $16 apiece.
It would seem to achieve this grand vision things will have to drastically change in the way we interact with mobile devices. One would imagine the path we are on at the moment cannot possibly get us to these numbers.
So as sit here looking at the gargantuan estimates above, I just wonder what would have to change to make these numbers achievable.

It has been a busy weekend so far and it is about half-way over and I didn’t even get a chance to blog. Believe it or not there hasn’t been too much blog-worthy material and writing for the sake of writing makes no sense.
So after spending about thirty minutes focusing on something exciting to share I thought it better to refer you to a couple of MSNBC articles which could be of interest.
Believe me I would like to provide some insight on these stories but I am devoid of strong opinions worth sharing at the moment. Oh Well… Tomorrow is another day.
Both of these focus on telecom in China. I hope you find them interesting.
· Apple, China Mobile discuss China iPhone
· China tests Mt. Everest cell station

Everyone and their brother is on record explaining how difficult it is to build a wireless network.

Wall Street is enthusiastic about lending money to Google to bid at the auction

Google will think about bringing in partners after the auction is over and it sees what happens.

The company has brought on game theory experts to help it in the bidding process.

There has been a great deal of speculation regarding the rumors of Google acquiringSprint with many thinking the idea is farfetched. It would seem however that since Google is working on its own wireless network, they are very serious about getting into the wireless space.
As we discussed in my recent post on the matter, Google likes to build everything itself from scratch. This is just the way the company operates. However if you are going to go into the wireless business it will take years to put towers around the US and then the world.
Think about the layers of negotiation which need to take place… City by city… Neighborhood by neighborhood -- the company has to place base stations with antennas on tall buildings, water towers and hilltops as far as the eye can see.
Sure this can be done, but it will take such a long time… Let’s say five years to cover the U.S.

Skype experienced its first publicized outage of WiFi phones this past weekend. TMCnet’s Tom Keating broke the news and has been posting a play by play on his blog.
Skype recently put out a statement as to what happened with the outage. Here are the details:

Skype’s engineering team has concluded their investigation into the outage that Tom Keating alerted you to yesterday and I wanted to share their findings with you:

Users of some Skype Certified devices experienced login problems on Sunday when a server-hosting location experienced network connection difficulties. As a result, some services became temporarily unavailable.

Question: What is the best way to get your mobile platform to be adopted by developers and subsequently end-users?
Answer: Pay off the developers
And that is just what Google is doing with their Android SDK. A total of $10 million dollars will be awarded to the best applications in a contest Google recently announced..
Having lived through the application wars of Apple vs. PC and then Microsoft Windows vs. IBM OS/2 I can recall just how important it is the have the application developers behind your platform.
For example in the publishing industry a popular software package for desktop publishers was Quark Express and the company was a loyal Apple developer.

Recent news that Sprint is not going to work with Clearwire to build out a WiMAX network only added to the rumors I have been hearing about Google acquiring Sprint Nextel. On the surface it seems like this would be a bad move for Google but in reality the world’s leading search engine has become so much more than just a website to go to when you want to find a trinket of information… The company now needs a wireless network to allow it to grow in the mobile search and related spaces such as watching YouTube videos on the subway.
Let’s look at Google from a philosophical level. The company has built almost everything from scratch in its past and present. Computers, operating system, web server software and more.

Oftentimes companies in the communications space ask me how they are doing compared to their competition in the areas of marketing and PR. They generally do this by asking me to take surveys about their company’s standing in the market. In addition, I often get calls from organizations on Wall Street asking about specific companies. These analysts typically want to know if target companies are worth investing in, etc.
While I am not a financial analyst myself I feel I am in a pretty good position to discuss a communications and or technology company’s standing in a market.